How to live meaningfully Photo credit: Guillaume Carels This is probably the hardest thing of all to learn, and the least taught. Living meaningfully is actually a combination of several things. It is, in one sense, your dedication to some purpose or goal. But it is also your sense of appreciation and dedication to the here and [...]
Archive for the ‘Self development’ Category
How to value yourself Photo credit: Ahmed Zahid It is perhaps cynical to say that society is a giant conspiracy to get you to feel badly about yourself, but it wouldn’t be completely inaccurate either. Advertisers make you feel badly so you’ll buy their product, politicians make you feel incapable so you’ll depend on their policies [...]
How to stay healthy Photo credit: naughton As a matter of practical consideration, the maintenance of your health involves two major components: minimizing exposure to disease or toxins, and maintenance of the physical body. Minimizing exposure to disease and toxins is mostly a matter of cleanliness and order. Simple things – like keeping the wood alcohol in [...]
How to Learn Photo credit: Mark Boucher Your brain consists of billions of neural cells that are connected to each other. To learn is essentially to form sets of those connections. Your brain is always learning, whether you are studying mathematics or staring at the sky, because these connections are always forming. The difference in what [...]
How to communicate clearly Photo credit: Katy Communicating clearly is most of all a matter of knowing what you want to say, and then employing some simple tools in order to say it. Probably the hardest part of this is knowing what you want to say. But it is better to spend time being sure you [...]
How to be creative Photo credit: Jaki Good Everybody can be creative, and if you look at your own life you will discover that you are already creative in numerous ways. Humans have a natural capacity to be creative – that’s how our minds work – and with practice can become very good at it. The [...]
How to empathize Photo credit: Irene Yan Most people live in their own world, and for the most part, that’s OK. But it is important to at least recognize that there are other people, and that they live in their own world as well. This will save you from the error of assuming that everyone else [...]
How to distinguish truth from fiction Photo credit: froodmat I have written extensively on this elsewhere, nonetheless, this remains an area schools to a large degree ignore. Sometimes I suspect it is because teachers feel their students must absorb knowledge uncritically; if they are questioning everything the teacher says they’ll never learn! The first [...]
How to read Photo credit: Arantxata Oddly, by this I do not mean “literacy” in the traditional sense, but rather, how to look at some text and to understand, in a deep way, what is being asserted (this also applies to audio and video, but grounding yourself in text will transfer relatively easily, if [...]
How to predict consequences The most common utterance at the scene of a disaster is, “I never thought…” The fact is, most people are very bad at predicting consquences, and schools never seem to think to teach them how to improve. The prediction of consequences is part science, part mathematics, and part visualization. It [...]
